A review by jheinemann287
Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood

2.0

This was my poem-a-day read for May, and as someone who adores Patricia Lockwood's 2017 memoir Priestdaddy and her 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, I WANTED to enjoy this collection. Sadly, I mostly found it to be tedious and pretentious. Many of the poems are about how characters exist doubly in their fictional world and also in the literal world as marks on piece of paper, and I guess that she's trying to say something moving about the narratives we piece together to make sense of our own lives, but any coherent message is too buried to find in these exhaustingly meta poems.

And again, this is coming from someone who will probably read everything Patricia Lockwood ever writes. No one can say she isn't brilliant.

Favorites:
"The Construction of a Forest for the Stage"

They say, "You see bright beetles," and the people
are forced to picture them: they break out into life
like beads on their upper lips, or gather themselves
like blood along a cut, or button themselves into the world
and then, in order to die, pop violently off the belly
of a third-row man in a black tuxedo. (52)

"The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation"

Tonight is dress rehearsal;
the horse shakes a hand heartily inside itself
and wishes itself good luck. "Are you galloping
hard in all your parts?" the front half asks the back,
and they take their first step forward, powered
with plunging stomachs.
Silence. "Who will make our Clop-Clop noise?"
the back half asks the front (54)

"Children with Lamps Pouring Out of Their Foreheads"

and the deeper we go the more we are the diamonds,
surrounded by sharp intakes of breath. Long years of breathing
the air down here have given us lung complaints: if sea stars are
all lung and tarantulas have four lungs, how can two be enough
for a Walking-Talking? Yet two is enough and two is a fact;
we cough and feel stabbing pains, we feel our own pickaxes
strike down inside us and pry up our chunks out pink
quartz, and we spit. (78)